Hollow City (Miss Peregrine’s Peculiar Children, #2)(87)

“Yes. It’s also possible that the moon is made of cheese. It’s just not bloody likely.”

“I can end argument right now,” said the folding man. “You want to know what wights will do with us once free to do anything? Come—I show you.”

“Strong stomachs only,” said the clown, glancing at Olive.

“If they can handle it, I can, too,” she said.

“Fair warning,” the clown shrugged. “Follow us.”

“I wouldn’t follow you off a sinking ship,” said Melina, who was just getting the shaking blind brothers to their feet again.

“Stay, then,” said the clown. “Anyone who’d rather not go down with the ship, follow us.”

*

The injured lay in mismatched beds in a makeshift hospital room, watched over by a nurse with a bulging glass eye. There were three patients, if you could call them that—a man and two women. The man lay on his side, half catatonic, whispering and drooling. One of the women stared blankly at the ceiling, while the other writhed under her sheets, moaning softly, in the grip of some nightmare. Some of the children watched from outside the door, keeping their distance in case whatever these people suffered from was contagious.

“How are they today?” the folding man asked the nurse.

“Getting worse,” she replied, buzzing from bed to bed. “I keep them sedated all the time now. Otherwise they just bawl.”

They had no obvious wounds. There were no bloody bandages, no limbs wrapped in casts, no bowls brimming with reddish liquid. The room looked more like overflow from a psychiatric ward than a hospital.

“What’s the matter with them?” I asked. “They were hurt in the raid?”

“No, brought here by Miss Wren,” answered the nurse. “She found them abandoned inside a hospital, which the wights had converted into some sort of medical laboratory. These pitiful creatures were used as guinea pigs in their unspeakable experiments. What you see is the result.”

“We found their old records,” the clown said. “They were kidnapped years ago by the wights. Long assumed dead.”

The nurse took a clipboard from the wall by the whispering man’s bed. “This fellow, Benteret, he’s supposed to be fluent in a hundred languages, but now he’ll only say one word—over and over again.”

I crept closer, watching his lips. Call, call, call, he was mouthing. Call, call, call.

Gibberish. His mind was gone.

“That one there,” the nurse said, pointing her clipboard at the moaning girl. “Her chart says she can fly, but I’ve never seen her so much as lift an inch out of that bed. As for the other one, she’s meant to be invisible. But she’s plain as day.”





“Were they tortured?” Emma asked.

“Obviously—they were tortured out of their minds!” said the clown. “Tortured until they forgot how to be peculiar!”

“You could torture me all day long,” said Millard. “I’d never forget how to be invisible.”

“Show them the scars,” said the clown to the nurse.

The nurse crossed to the motionless woman and pulled back her sheets. There were thin red scars across her stomach, along the side of her neck, and beneath her chin, each about the length of a cigarette.

“I’d hardly call this evidence of torture,” said Millard.

“Then what would you call it?” the nurse said angrily.

Ignoring her question, Millard said, “Are there more scars, or is this all she has?”

“Not by a long shot,” said the nurse, and she whisked the sheets off to expose the woman’s legs, pointing out scars on the back of the woman’s knee, her inner thigh, and the bottom of her foot.

Millard bent to examine the foot. “That’s odd placement, wouldn’t you say?”

“What are you getting at, Mill?” said Emma.

“Hush,” said Enoch. “Let him play Sherlock if he wants. I’m rather enjoying this.”

“Why don’t we cut him in ten places?” said the clown. “Then we’ll see if he thinks it’s torture!”

Millard crossed the room to the whispering man’s bed. “May I examine him?”

“I’m sure he won’t object,” said the nurse.

Millard lifted the man’s sheets from his legs. On the bottom of one of his bare feet was a scar identical to the motionless woman’s.

The nurse gestured toward the writhing woman. “She’s got one too, if that’s what you’re looking for.”

“Enough of this,” said the folding man. “If that is not torture, then what?”

“Exploration,” said Millard. “These incisions are precise and surgical. Not meant to inflict pain—probably done under anesthetic, even. The wights were looking for something.”

“And what was that?” Emma asked, though she seemed to dread the answer.

“There’s an old saying about a peculiar’s foot,” said Millard.

“Do any of you remember it?”

Horace recited it. “A peculiar’s sole is the door to his soul,” he said. “It’s just something they tell kids, though, to get them to wear shoes when they play outside.”